Philip Yamron

ARTIST STATEMENT

I love glass. I love to watch it move, to watch it glow. I have been watching it, working with it and thinking about it for almost 15 years and some days it feels like it is the very first time I have touched the stuff. It is enchanting, frustrating, difficult, engaging, consuming, hypnotic. Working with this material can produce the greatest "high" and the most defeating of "lows". The scope and spectrum of what can be created with glass is, for me, matched with the scope and spectrum of what can be felt while engaging with and dancing with this material.

I love technique, the process. One action folding into another, into another. Growing ever more complicated while deepening the beauty that can come forth. I once heard a comparison in regards to baseball and symphony musicians that I feel connected to. It was said that if a baseball player hits 50 percent of his shots he is considered a marvel. But if a symphony player hits only 99 percent of his notes he is out of a job. I feel this connection to glass making, I am striving for better than 99 percent. Not for the control of perfection, but the symphony that is possible with this material. If it takes the rest of my life, I will happily show up to play some more.

ARTIST BIO

Philip is currently the owner and head gaffer of Pyro Art Glass Studios in Mount Clemens, Michigan. He has been the resident glass blower at the Henry Ford Museum Greenfield Village, where he demonstrated techniques and designs in blown glass spanning over 400 years. He has also taught at the House Cat Glass Studio in Ferndale, at the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Studio and the Cleveland Institute of Art Glass in Ohio, and the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York.